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Bush Derangement Syndrome is alive, well, and living in the head of Nancy A. Youssef at the Daily Beast.

In a March 26 item tagged "Fallen Hero" (?!) about the Army charging Bowe Bergdahl with "desertion and misbehaving before the enemy," the web site's Senior National Security Correspondent wrote that "the administration celebrated negotiating his release after years of failed bids by both the current and former administration." But Bergdahl walked away from his post in June 2009, five months after Barack Obama's inauguration. Youssef's report actually had worse components than that.

On today's Morning Joe, liberal Republican Nicolle Wallace sought to slough off a Politico article reporting that Jeb Bush is losing the influential "Laura Ingraham primary." Claimed Wallace, who served as Jeb's press secretary when he was governor of Florida, Ingraham "hates everybody. She always hates the Republicans more than the Democrats at this point, too."

Wallace even suggested that Ingraham's criticism of McCain [for whom Wallace also worked] and Romney contributed to their defeats: "will we ever wonder what effect that has in the outcome; both guys lost? Do we think it's good to cheer down our own side? I just wish we spent as much time cheering against the Democrats."

While reporting on Monday’s NBC Nightly News with the latest from the Iranian side of the international talks in Switzerland over their nuclear program, Ann Curry smeared U.S. conservatives by likening them to radical hardliners in Iran’s Islamic regime: “As in the U.S., Iran has conservatives who don't trust the other side and they are ready to pounce if they believe negotiators give up too much.”

On Sunday on CNN's State of the Union, Dana Bash, while interviewing Texas Senator and GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz, attempted to compare his alleged lack of experience to that of Barack Obama when he declared his candidacy in 2007.

It did not go well for her. It's a mystery why Bash might have thought that Cruz wouldn't have an answer for her faux concerns, but he did, and he hit her pitches out of the park. Video and a transcript follow the jump.

New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin hit the New Hampshire hustings for his condescending Page 1 story, "Bush and Walker Point G.O.P. to Contrary Paths." Martin made it clear where those paths lead: Either up to the sunny moderate climes of colorful diversity with Jeb Bush, or down a dispiritingly white conservative lockstep path with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. In Martin's condescending take, Jeb Bush is on a mission to tell hard truths to his party: That Republicans "must accept a changing country: that the path to the presidency will be found through appealing to voters who may not look like them."

Screenwriter and actress Lena Dunham has managed to put herself back in the limelight amid a new controversy. Dunham finds herself in the news not because her show Girls had season premiere ratings that plummeted by 40 percent, or the questionable incidents from her book Not that Kind of Girl that included passages of molesting her sister or falsely accusing an innocent man of raping her. No. This time Dunham is being accused of anti-Semitism for a quiz she wrote, asking readers to choose which statement would refer to her dog…..or her Jewish boyfriend.

On their Monday evening newscasts, the major broadcast networks kept up their attacks on the State of Indiana for having enacted a religious freedom law that aims to protect individuals from government infringement based on their religious beliefs. While ABC, CBS, and NBC mentioned that there are those supporting the law, their coverage continued to veer off in a slanted direction against the law by painting Republicans as being “in damage control mode” while the“avalanche of criticism” continues to grow.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has risked her life to promote women’s rights in and outside of Islam. She was born in Somalia, where she survived female genital mutilation at the hands of her grandmother. She grew up to serve as a Member of Parliament in the Netherlands, wrote a script for a film that dared to criticize Islamic treatment of women, and when the death threats became too much for even the government secret service to handle, she was forced into hiding.

Of course, none of this mattered to Jon Stewart, who on the March 23 episode of The Daily Show chose to spend the entire interview feeling tenderly for Islam, claiming that people tend to “single out as though there is something inherently wrong with it that is not wrong with other religions.”

It’s fair to say most conservatives aren’t big fans of Jon Stewart, but according to TV critic Sonia Saraiya, Trevor Noah, Stewart’s successor as host of The Daily Show, is in for an even nastier response from the right, much of it having to do with his skin color.

Apropos of Comedy Central’s Monday announcement that Noah, a biracial South African comedian, will take over for Stewart sometime this year, Saraiya remarked that “this country spent years embroiled in a debate over whether an American citizen who became the president was ‘really’ American; what are we going to do to Trevor Noah? Conservative critics have a practiced, doublespeaking method of piling on the heat on figures who stand out because of their race or gender or sexuality, while protesting that they are doing no such thing.”

If then-Senator John F. Kennedy could have looked into the future and seen his youngest brother's career in the world's greatest deliberative body, he'd have named Sen. Ted Kennedy as among the best to have ever graced its hallowed halls, insisted Hardball host Chris Matthews in his effusive Let Me Finish commentary on the March 30 program, pegged to the opening of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate.

UPDATE, March 31: This morning in an email, the AP's Lederman pointed me to a Saturday afternoon "Big Story" item time-stamped the day before the report to which this blog post below links. For whatever reason, that earlier "Big Story" item has more detail than what appears, despite the Sunday time stamp, to be Lederman's original report posted at the AP's national site. In that "Big Story" item, Lederman writes that "Like last time, the White House arranged for the reporters covering the president to wait at a separate location nearby where Obama won't be visible," and that "Previous administrations have allowed brief news media coverage during presidential rounds of golf. Obama's policy generally is not to allow reporters to observe him." Lederman did not mention reporters' decision to stay in a shed rather than return to their hotels. The posts' point about reporters' willingness to submit to what I described as "dismissive, insulting treatment" stands.

At the Associated Press on Sunday, Josh "Lapdog" Lederman filed a brief report telling readers the names of the captains of industry who would be golfing with President Barack Obama that day. Bigwigs with the Floridian, the Boston Celtics, and (yes) even Halliburton, the former source of all evil during the Bush 43 administration, were in the foursome.

Lederman "somehow" failed to note that the White House ordered reporters back to their hotels, and that when they refused, they were banished to a shed. Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner has the details Lederman didn't care to mention, even in passing:

Maybe the left needs to rethink their oft-present and deep-seated hatred of all things associated with Comcast, other cable companies, and the satellite TV providers. It turns out that those "evil" entities have done quite a bit to cushion left-leaning CNN and MSNBC from what would otherwise be a harsh financial reality.

The Associated Press's David Bauder, in an item which somehow was deemed to be deserving of "Big Story" status, essentially acknowledged that in his Sunday afternoon review of the cratering and chaotic situation at MSNBC when he gave an overview of how the cable news channels' revenues shake out.

On Monday, Comedy Central announced that South African comedian Trevor Noah would be replacing Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show. To get a feel for Noah's brand of humor, one could simply watch his debut on the fake news show in December of 2014, when he jokingly declared that present-day America had worse race relations than Apartheid South Africa.

On Monday, the Washington Post's Sandhya Somashekhar zeroed in on the "unabashed approach" of Carafem, Washington, DC's latest abortion center, which, in her words, "reflects a new push to destigmatize the nation's most controversial medical procedure by talking about it openly and unapologetically." Somashekhar, the liberal newspaper's "social change" reporter, spotlighted how the upstart "aims to feel more like a spa than a medical clinic."

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